Fabric Arts Festival Opening Night

6:00 PM
FOOD (Part 1)
Com Amor (With Love)
with Linsey Wallace
Harbor View Gallery & Observation Deck

Through performance, installation, video, and food, Linsey Wallace approaches the Azores as a place inherited from a distance. Although she has never visited the islands, they have been present through family stories, traditions, recipes, and images — fragments through which a relationship to place is carried across generations.

At the center of the work is a live cooking performance around Chicharros Assados na Certã — horse mackerel coated in corn flour and cooked on a traditional cast-iron pan. Preparing, serving, and eating together become a way of bringing personal and family histories into a collective experience. Moving between the sea, the kitchen, and the family table, the wider installation also incorporates materials and images connected to Wallace’s family and the islands, exploring how a place can be remembered, imagined, and continually remade from afar.

7:30 PM
FILM PREMIERE (Part 2)
A Beat of Saudades
with Diogo Lima & Henrique Ferreira
Cook Memorial Theater

Between factory shifts and weekend dances, a little-known world of pop, rock and disco took shape within New England’s bustling Portuguese and Azorean communities. A BEAT OF SAUDADE revisits some of the musicians and audiences who brought that scene to life in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Henrique Ferreira’s research, Azorean director Diogo Lima brings their records and memories into the present, moving between New England and the Azores. Dreams of stardom meet everyday pleasures, compromises and lingering doubts: after building a life across the ocean, where do you belong? Commissioned by FABRIC and developed between 2024 and 2026, the film culminates a three-year project exploring music, migration, and memory.

8:30 PM
CONCERT (Part 3)
Filipe Furtado
with Filipe Furtado Trio
Cook Memorial Theater

Azorean pianist, composer, and songwriter Filipe Furtado closes FABRIC’s opening night with a performance by his trio, a group that uses song as a starting point to explore improvisation, jazz influences, and contemporary sound practices. Rooted in Coimbra, the trio serves as a space for collective creation, where compositions emerge through dialogue between piano, saxophone, and drums and are further expanded in live performance through electronics and vocals. The project is based on Furtado’s original repertoire — shaped by his trajectory as an Azorean musician and composer living in Coimbra since 2010 — and developed in collaboration with Paulo Silva (drums) and Filipe Fidalgo (saxophone). In 2025, the trio released the album Como Se Matam Primaveras, marking a key moment in their ongoing exploration of form, improvisation, and contemporary song.